The Morning Joe panel wrapped up its lead segment this morning by discussing the latest turns in the Trayvon Martin shooting.
Over the past two weeks, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski have devoted several segments to discussing the shooting of the 17-year-old Florida teenager and expressing their outrage over the fact that shooter George Zimmerman has not been arrested.
Today, Joe expressed his concern over turning the tragedy into a political issue. Joe cited an NYT Lede blog post that references a Daily Caller piece that the Lede blog writes "...seems to have been selected to reinforce the argument that the victim of the fatal shooting was a menacing figure who might plausibly have been mistaken for a criminal."
In an even more fiendish case not discussed in the Ledge blog entry, Gawker reported yesterday that a white supremacist hacker allegedly broke into Martin's social media accounts and posted messages from them online.
"Why is it that some on the right are actually taking this up as a cause?," Scarborough wondered. "When, as the National Review said almost immediately after it happened, this has nothing to do with gun rights; this has nothing to do with the second amendment; this has nothing to do with “Stand Your Ground” laws; this has nothing to do with the NRA. This has everything to do with a guy that’s trying to play security cop, who is unhinged, who chased down and shot a 17-year-old kid armed with Skittles and iced tea."
Joe also wondered if the issue is being politicized, in part, because of President Obama.
"I guess it’s because the president actually said something to comfort the parents. And I guess they just can’t handle that," he said.
Time's Mark Halperin, also a panelist this morning said: "It’s two of the most depressing trends in our political media culture. One is, in the wake of the O.J. Simpson trial, every criminal case with disputed facts becomes fodder for people in the media. But the other is everything has to be political for some of these people. And if this is the big story of the day, they feel they must talk about it, and they must talk about it in a partisan way and in a way that is just so bad for the country."
Joe went on to mention his thoughts on Trayvon Martin's Twitter feed: "You go through that Twitter feed; it’s innocuous at best. I can show you a lot of white kids from suburban neighborhoods…I could take you through their Facebook pages, their Twitter feeds, their pictures…I wonder if some of these people that are attacking him would like their children’s social media pages gone through. This is beneath contempt."
